2006/12/28

I feel in very good company every time that I learn that people that I know/read/admire "outside" are also "inside". It has just happened with Scott, but has happened to me before with Tridge, Sam Ruby, Erich Gamma...

process capability: wether you have or not a reliable and repetible cycle time for a given set of problems

delays: hint of opportunities for cost/waste reduction

queuing theory

total cycle time = number of things in process / average completion rate

shorter cycle time: ability to add new features

small tasks and slack decrease the total cycle time

utilization paradox (48m23s) - not having slack increases the cycle time. This is one of the ideas behind 3M's 15% of free time rule (Google's 20% precedent). Organizations targeting 100% utilization are meassuring the wrong thing.

Keep a honest queue/to-do list: short and in the realm of the things that can be reasonably expected to be done; no useful purpose for long queues

Stablish a regular cadence, limit work to capacity, minimize the size of things in the process.

2006/12/26

You *have to* keep an eye on Google's TechTalks. I have not seen an obvious link, so here it is a search and a feed on that search (better, since it provides longer descriptions). They are mostly about computer science, but the range of topics is quite broad.

It is great that they are choosing to publish all these terrific talks they host.

Google TechTalks are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics ranging from Current Affairs, Science, Engineering, Humanities, Business, Law, Entertainment, Medicine, and the Arts.

I also learned about the Authors@Google series:

Authors@Google is a speaker series where thought-provoking, Zeitgeist-making, trend-setting authors come to the Googleplex to read from their works and share their thoughts with us. The following authors have agreed to release their talks to the world on Google Video.

2006/12/20

My (lousy) Technorati rank owes some points to splogs (spam blogs). It looks like some spam blogs are being created by posting whatever they get from subscribing to a google blog search. So far, I've been hit by two of them (sample, using tinyurl). According to an unscientific Technorati search, this particular spam amounted to about 10000 posts for December 8th. Yuk(*).

2006/12/19

There are lots of versions of your identity out there, but we'll lump them into two broad categories: your reputation (the story others tell about you), and your self-image (the story you tell about yourself).(...)Your reputation is my story about you. You can't own this by definition; as soon as you own it, it's no longer my story about you; it instantly becomes an autobiography instead of a reputation.(...)In principle, controlling the information that makes up your self-image seems easy - you just choose what you tell to whom, and under what conditions. (...) You value your privacy, of course, but you also value other things, like the ability to get a credit card and the ability to travel on airplanes. (...) You have a choice between getting a credit and controlling information about yourself - if you want the credit, you have to give up information somebody else chooses, and you have to do it on somebody else's terms.

I learned about Ceci n'est pas un Bob when he recently left ibm. Good reading if you are interested in identity, privacy, security and risk; and everyone should have at least a mild interest in them. Although I confess that I often skip Bob Blakley and Bruce Schneier when checking my feeds; as Calvin says (*), "Reality continues to ruin my life", and I often don't feel like having my life ruined by their uncomfortable reality reports.

(*) It is always a good thing to keep Calvin and Hobbes quotes at hand.

(Post written while trying to cope with the huge frustration of seeing someone spreading a false and damaging story about me. Yuk.)

2006/12/15

TiddlyWikis are my main note taking device. But what happens when I want to share my notes on some topic with someone?TiddlyTools' NewDocumentPlugin can do lots of things, but one of them is to export to a simple html file the tiddlers that you are viewing at any time, without the side bars or the header. So, in my SideBarOptions tiddler, I have added <<newDocument ask snap tiddlerDisplay>> and it shows as a "create a snapshot" button. tiddlerDisplay is the id of the div that displays the main tiddlers; it could be any other id if you wanted to have a different snapshot.

Minimal means that it is not the kind of methodology where you have a huge role and workproduct initial list that you have to cleanup for your project (and that usually makes you shop more than you really need...): 6 roles, 18 tasks, 20 work products, 200 printed pages.

Complete: can be manifested as an entire process to build a system (scrum does not deal with the solution construction subprocess)

Extensible: can be used as a foundation on which process content can be added or tailored as needed. In fact OpenUP consists of

A base process - OpenUP/Basic

Extensions to this base process, such as Model Driven Development content

The main worproducts and their realtion to roles/subprocesses can be viewed here:

The Work Item List is very close to the scrum backlog (not only for the current iteration, but for all the project). Of course, it is iterative, a la RUP:

But adaptable! The project plan is a 2 pages doc, describing the goals for the different iterations. And, since each iteartion brings its learning, the plan changes:

I really like the concept of "Stakeholder Satisfaction Space".

Other things that I'd like to highlight:

daily meetings

test driven developemnt

use case based

promotes a readable representation of the architecture. Much of the architecture can be

Selected instead of designed (patterns)

Referenced instead of described

OpenUP/Basic instantiates the core values of the agile manifesto in some slightly more concrete core principles:

OpenUP/Basic Key principles

Agile manifesto

Collaborate to align interests and share understanding

Individuals and interactions overprocess and tools

Evolve to continuously obtain feedback and improve

Responding to change over following a plan

Balance competing priorities to maximize stakeholder value

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Focus on articulating the architecture

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Does it work? I cannot tell, but at least looks like its building blocks have proven to work often.

I'm a big fan of the Tab Mix Plus Firefox extension. I have a hard time when using a browser without it and I cannot duplicate tabs, undo tab closing, store several browsing sessions, list all the opened tabs in a dropdown menu...

I'm an even bigger fan of TiddlyWikis(*), personal wikis that are self-contained in a single html file that can be in your hard drive or usb stick, or hosted in the terrific and free tiddlyspot service. I use them to record personal knowledge, to write docs and "microtag" at the paragraph level, to write checklists, to keep my to-do lists...

I just changed a Tab Mix Plus preference to switch to my left tab whenever I close a tab. And my left tab always hosts my to-do list in the shape of a MonkeyGTD tiddlywiki.

Will this change mean that my browsing parties will end up being shorter and I'll be pushed to Get Thing Done instead of following yet another interesting link?

Or am I just adding guilty feeling drops to some future pointless browsing?

(*) aside: It was the former IBM Rational Doug Landauer that pointed me to TiddlyWikis (among the endless list of interesting links that he always posted in his intranet blog(**)). It was the magic of seeing a wiki run in my browser that changed my perception of JavaScript and got me interested in it.

I did not learn about this from Booch's blog itself, but from a comment by Ferran Rodenas to a post in Kelly Drahzal's blog. The interesting bit about this is that Ferran works for "la Caixa", a very important ibm client, and it is a very good thing for me and some team mates to be able to read his posts and keep track of his blogroll. Or explore his linkedin profile and our common connections. The openess that blogs and social software have brought rocks!